Patient Safety

Patient safety is of the utmost importance at Maimonides, below are just a few of the procedures and tools put in place to enhance the quality of patient care.

Better Care Through Checklists:
Many of our efforts to improve patient safety make use of a simple but highly effective tool -- the checklist. These checklists, which incorporate practices that are known to improve patient outcomes, helped us to reduce bloodstream infections, and achieve better outcomes for patients on mechanical ventilation. Our most recent efforts are focused on the development of an interdisciplinary daily rounding checklist.

Operating Room Briefings and Debriefings:Before a surgical procedure, our surgical teams meet to verify the correct patient, procedure and surgical site, make sure we have the needed equipment, supplies and personnel at hand, and discuss any complications that may arise. Then, after the procedure, we discuss future needs to make sure that the transition of care is handled smoothly.

Rapid Response Teams:
We encourage caregivers and patients' loved ones to seek help at the first sign that a patient is about to have cardiac or respiratory arrest. Maimonides implemented a Rapid Response Team in May 2006. The purpose of the team is to rescue patients in a non-ICU setting early in their decline before clinical deterioration progresses to cardiac and/or respiratory arrest. The team delivers critical care expertise to the patient's bedside or wherever it is needed. We believe that this will help reduce the number of arrests, or "codes."

Safety Dashboards:
Departments keep safety front and center through the use of dashboards, which chart progress and address areas of focus. This feedback loop allows units to see the effects of their actions and helps develop a culture that is more sensitive to safety.

Communication and Teamwork Training:
Across health care, communication failures among providers are a leading cause of patient harm. To minimize these failures, the Medical Center has adopted TeamSTEPPS. This system is based on 20 years’ experience and lessons learned from High-Reliability Organizations such as military operations, aviation, and nuclear power industries. TeamSTEPPS is designed to improve quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare through the use of practical and adaptable ready to use materials for training and ongoing teamwork.

Computerized Provider Order Entry:
Maimonides was among the first hospitals nationwide to implement a computerized system for ordering medications and physician order entry in 1996-1997. This system decreases the risks of transcription errors associated with handwritten orders, and assists in the prevention of drug interactions and dosage errors. In recognition of technological innovation in patient care, Maimonides has received the prestigious award for "Most Wired Hospital" on multiple occasions throughout the last ten years.